Umbrellas for impossible weather

Round 1
Image 1 — "The Umbrella Between Worlds" : 3.50
The painterly surface is the best thing here — thick worked pigment, warm studio light, a real sense of a canvas standing wet on its easel. But the picture leans on the oldest framing trick in the medium, the painting-of-a-painting-in-a-studio, and uses it to avoid committing to a scene. The idea underneath is vague too: a woman looming above a small gentleman sharing her umbrella suggests two worlds without establishing either, and the weather is simply rain. Lovely handling, very little said.

Image 2 — "Mr.Spider with its own made umbrella" : 3.60
A genuinely charming thought — of course a spider builds its own umbrella, and of course it is made of silk. The web canopy is the best-rendered object in the round, each radial thread strung with droplets that catch the warm light beautifully. What holds it back is everything around that canopy: a stock animated-feature spider with oversized eyes and a human grin, floating in a generic blue downpour. The invention is in the umbrella alone, and the weather it is built for is entirely ordinary.

Image 4 — "Anti-whirlwind umbrella." : 3.90
The only artist who read the brief properly. Everyone else designed an unusual umbrella for normal rain; this one invented the weather — a waterspout tearing down a city street flinging live goldfish through the air — and then engineered a response to it, inverting the canopy into a basin that catches the vortex and holds it. That is a complete piece of thinking, and the lone yellow figure with his back to us against all that blue is a strong, simple composition. It is the coarsest image of the four: oversaturated to the point of glare, a generic wet-neon street behind, and a tornado that behaves more like decoration than weather. Best idea by a distance, roughest delivery.

Image 3 — "Rainy day in Paris" : 3.95
A ballet tutu held overhead as an umbrella, in the fog, beneath the Eiffel Tower — and not one thing in the frame nudges you or explains the joke. That restraint is why it wins. The tulle actually behaves like tulle, stiff layered net catching the last grey light rather than falling like fabric, and the choice resonates instead of merely surprising: Paris, ballet, something beautiful and impractical pressed into service against the rain. The atmosphere is the finest craft of the round, real depth built out of fog, headlamps and wet tarmac, with the figure in flat black anchoring it all. It answers a slightly different brief than the one set — the umbrella is impossible, the weather is ordinary — and that is the only thing I hold against it. My winner.